Article by James Fox-Smith | COUNTRY ROADS Magazine

Despite having spent much of his life living in far-flung parts of the United States and Europe, Don Cincone will always consider northeast Louisiana home. Born in rural Richland Parish to sharecropper parents in 1936, this great-grandson of former slaves developed a powerful affinity for the woods and fields as a child. Even now, as a successful artist whose life and work have led him all over the world, the natural environment of his early years still serves as his lodestar and informs his aesthetic. “Inspiration is everywhere. The problem is we aren’t listening,” he declared. “Growing up I learned the endless information and knowledge that is to be found in the natural setting. That, as many others have thought, is the greatest university in existence.”

The sustenance that Cincone derives from his natural surroundings is easy to spot in his work. The people in his expressionistic, figurative acrylics dance through fields of plenty “. Beneath fruit-laden boughs, through fields of flowers and dappled glades one imagines heavy with summer’s fragrance, the artist’s graceful, elongated characters ride horses, strum guitars, gather berries, and dance barefoot to the rhythms of the seasons. Cincone’s message is clear: the environment nourishes the characters that inhabit it; and we, as humans, disengage from that at our peril. 

Not all of this came to Cincone at once. He spent much of his life far from Louisiana and from nature. For an African American child growing up in the Jim Crow South of the ‘forties and ‘fifties, access to fine arts education was virtually non-existent. “To begin with, I only saw what was in books,” he recalled, “and even they were very limited because I couldn’t go into the library.” But Cincone’s mother worked for a woman who, when she learned that the young Cincone loved art, checked out books from which he discovered the European masters of the Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism, Modernism, and more. When a stint in the armed forces took him to Europe, he pursued the objects of his passion into the great museums. “Rembrandt, Rubens, Pissarro; I looked, and I tried to emulate the techniques to get the same results,” he said. “I ended up with a blend of styles because there were so many schools of art across my life.”

Cincone returned to the United States determined to find an area of the visual arts where he could make a living, but unable to find a gallery willing to take him, he trained in fashion illustration, first in New York City and then at the San Francisco School of Fashion Design. Fashion illustration provided Cincone not only with a livelihood through which he could exercise his creative impulses but also a medium through which to explore the artistic possibilities of the female form. “In fashion I learned that, while there are trends, there has to be a signature style that distinguishes it from the masses,” he noted. “The fashion industry put me in touch with where that identity comes from.”

It also made him disciplined, and prolific. Even now, as an artist in his eighties painting to satisfy an inner drive to express rather than to put food on the table, Cincone approaches the process of making art with rigor. “My method is akin to the agrarian,” he said. “I get up every morning and go to work.” Now, though, he gets to let inspiration and the subject matter—rather than the commission—guide his hand. “I allow what I’m doing aimlessly, to guide where I’m going. It’s out of that kind of intent that many of these imageries begin to come forth.”

The results—feminine forms rendered in a loose, expressionist style that echo Cincone’s study of the French pointillists like Seurat and Pissarro, who built images using thousands of dots of color as opposed to a broader brush stroke—fairly glow with an inner light. The magic, he explained, begins in the patterns of paint on canvas, but it ends in the eye of the beholder. “The feeling can only come when we—with the way our eyes are made—blend the colors ourselves.”

That “feeling,” Cincone explained, is what matters. It’s what ties a painting together—from the artist’s original inspiration through the techniques employed to put an image onto canvas, to the moment the viewer encounters the finished result. “My first responsibility as an artist is to listen to the feeling I had when the illumination came to me,” he said. “When the audience encounters the work there’s a communion that takes place; there’s a feeling evoked. When the audience feels that, then the painting is finished. The work finishes itself when the feeling and the work become one.”

**This article originally appeared in the February 2019 issue. Subscribe to our print edition here.